Emong wrote:But, and I wonder if you would agree with me here, I also think there's another way to be pretentious as well. I'm thinking about the kind of attitude of "let's drop all this theory nonsense and just enjoy the hobby. It's all for fun and play!"

DJ_Izumi wrote:This thread makes me kinda miss the days when you could put Evangelion to the theme to Top Gun, and people would just shut up and enjoy it. :X

I'm thinking perhaps this is where it was directed at.

I've only been editing AMVs since 2007 so I couldn't really tell by my own experience how things were before that. Nonetheless, my wild guess is that this magical past Izumi is talking about didn't really exist. It's not as if people were tr00 in the past and the present is somehow corrupt. The corruption is there from the beginning.

Nah, there totally was a time when practically nobody had standards. There also wasn't much in the way of widely available technology, so you had a handy excuse to point to for why something felt rather meh. Now you have to own up to not putting in a lot of effort.

BasharOfTheAges wrote:Nah, there totally was a time when practically nobody had standards. There also wasn't much in the way of widely available technology, so you had a handy excuse to point to for why something felt rather meh. Now you have to own up to not putting in a lot of effort.

Yup. Because just being ABLE to put Evangelion to the Top Gun Anthem was a technological feat at the time.

AMVs were once nothing but cuts and fades done to VHS and sometimes DVD ripped footage. When I was getting into AMVs DVD ripping and digisubs was just becoming the standard. What got me into it though were these CDRs we'd trade at school with various 'neat stuff' on them, including some with AMVs. A lot of 'Classic' AMVs were on these CDs and they'd be boo'd by today's standards just for being so 'unremarkable'.

Beowulf wrote:1. People improve at anything by doing it. Not talking about it.3. Whenever someone else tells you something isn't working, they're almost always right. Whenever someone tells you EXACTLY what isn't working and how to fix it, they are almost always wrong.

I find that talking about theory and technical details helps me to clarify my thoughts, and that clarifies what action I need to take. If I do watch a video and something strikes me as not working, there's got to be a reason. Sometimes it's easy to spot, sometimes not. I tend to refrain from giving exact advice (or, opinion) about what to put in place of the offending clip or whatever. One, it's your video, and two, if I tell you that the left-to-right pan in the middle of a section with a lot of right-to-left movement is breaking the flow, then the criticism suggests one solution.

2. Destructive critism is helpful if you can listen to the message and ignore the messenger.5. A perceptive person can find value in even the most idiotic of feedback.

True. "Your instrumental makes no sense" is a valid statement whether it's surrounded by a long critique, a bunch of abuse, or nothing at all.

4. Most people are so attached to their comfort zone that they won't do what it takes to make something truly great.

Those that have developed their skills enough to have a comfort zone, yes.

I'd like to compare the AMV community to the Copacabana. Ahh yes, Copacabana. Thousands of bodies everywhere. In fact, just one body. a single immense ramified mass of flesh, all sexes merged. A single, shameless, expanded human polyp a single organism, in which all collude like the sperm in seminal fluid. The lack of distinction between the town and the beach brings the primal scene more or less directly into the public arena. The sexual act is permanent, but not in the sense of Nordic eroticism; it is in the epidermal promiscuity, the confusion of bodies, lips, buttocks, hips - a single fractal entity disseminated beneath the membrane of the sun.